Difficult Conversations (HBR 20-Minute Manager Series). Harvard Business Review

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       What Makes a Conversation Difficult?

       What Makes a Conversation Difficult?

      You know the feeling: that knot in the pit of your stomach; the fog that descends on your mind. You’re avoiding a difficult conversation. Maybe you fear the public confrontation if you ask a colleague to stop interrupting you in meetings. Perhaps you don’t know how to tell a fellow team member that she’s not pulling her weight. Or you want to ask your boss for a promotion, but you don’t know how to begin the discussion. Maybe you tried to bring up what you thought was a straightforward matter, but it fell flat. When you have a problem, people tell you to “talk about it,” but no one tells you how. This book will help you move from paralysis to productive action and find the right words and the right methods to express yourself.

      At work we tend to focus on work: knocking off tasks, meeting our performance goals, getting a raise. But our inner lives—our personal goals, needs, aspirations, and fears—inform and influence everything we do. Both our functional agendas (“I need that production schedule by tomorrow!”) and our emotional agendas (“The production manager’s stonewalling made me look weak in the status meeting!”) will sometimes collide with those of our coworkers. Misunderstandings, even conflicts, arise. Whether those disagreements throw us off balance and disrupt our work or lead to conversations that yield valuable insights and creative solutions is up to us.

      A difficult conversation is one in which the other person has a viewpoint that differs from yours, one or both of you feel insecure in some way, and the stakes seem high. Whether you have tough feedback to deliver to an employee or colleague or whether you feel wronged, thwarted, or misunderstood by the other person, these situations can be unsettling, even if you’re a pretty good communicator.

      Understanding what’s at the heart of your situation helps you conduct a more productive discussion. Let’s look at some of the reasons why conversations are difficult.

Conflicting interests

      Your role in the organization influences what you want to achieve in a situation. If, for example, you’re a marketing manager on a major product update, your priority is probably hitting every rollout deadline. Your colleague in production, however, is focused on meeting design requirements. Of course, successfully delivering an important product requires meeting both quality and schedule specifications. But those differing interests will naturally cause conflict at times. You may find it tough to talk about them because each person quickly gets entrenched in their position (“We’ve got to improve call quality” versus “We have to cut costs by 5%”). Sometimes interests also become misaligned when outside-the-office needs, such as family commitments or health issues, conflict with those at work. Developing an awareness of the factors that affect each person’s approach to the project in question allows us to find ways to accommodate them.

Different personal styles

      You think of yourself as a doer—a no-nonsense person who just gets the job done. No intrigue, no drama. Your teammate is a talker. He asks lots of questions, thinks things through aloud, considers the unintended consequences. Usually your different styles are able to coexist—but there’s a deadline looming, and the project feels bogged down. How do you get him to move from exploring possibilities СКАЧАТЬ